Developing Literate Identities with English Language Learners through Digital Storytelling

TLDR

Digital storytelling offers children and adolescents a multimodal platform to create narratives that reflect their lives, contrasting with traditional print‑based literacy instruction and leveraging their out‑of‑school engagement with popular culture and digital texts to scaffold academic learning. The article examines how two English language learners—Diego, a Mexican‑American kindergartener, and Allie Feng, a Chinese‑American high‑school junior—used their sociocultural identities, foundational literacies, and new literacies skills to design and present digital stories.

Abstract

__________ Digital storytelling provides an opportunity for children and adolescents to design multimodal narratives that represent and reflect upon their lives and interests. In the article we look at how two English language learners, Diego, a male Mexican-American kindergartener, and Allie Feng, a female Chinese-American junior in high school, drew upon their sociocultural identities, foundational literacies practices, and new literacies competencies to design and present digital stories. _______________________ School literacy instruction is often based on a traditional, print-based conception of text (Alvermann, Moore, Hinchmann, Phelps, & Waff, 1998; Hagood, Provost, Skinner, & Egelson, in press). At the same time, children’s and adolescents’ out-of-school literacies and cultural practices related to popular culture texts (Alvermann et al., 1998; Hagood, Stevens, & Reinking, 2002; Moje, 2002) and multi-modal, digital texts (Lewis & Fabos, 2005; Majar, 2001) are highly motivating, and, as such, can serve as a valuable scaffolds for students’ academic learning (Skinner, 2007b; Hobbs & Frost, 2003; Morrell, 2002). Research on children’s and adolescents’ new literacies practices outside of school has shown that they read and utilize texts using sophisticated literacy competencies (Mackey, 2003; Vasudevan, 2006). These literacies involve engagements such as those with popular culture (Alvermann, Moon, & Hagood, 1999; Dyson, 2003); using visual and digital technologies